currently reading: All the Fierce Tethers by Lia Purpura
books bought
Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
This Woman's Work by Julie Delporte, trans. Helge Dascher and Aleshia Jensen
Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas
Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum
Lanny by Max Porter
August by Romina Paula, trans. Jennifer Croft
How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas
The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions by David Benatar
All the Fierce Tethers by Lia Purpura
books received
Loudermilk; or, the Origin of the World; or, The Real Poet by Lucy Ives
The Crying Book by Heather Christie (e-galley, out 11/5)
Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco (out 10/1)
books finished
Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
This Woman's Work by Julie Delporte, trans.
Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas
Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum
August by Romina Paula, trans. Jennifer Croft
How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas
The Human Predicament by David Benatar
Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco
Hey you,
The books I want to recommend are piling up, but I don't feel like I have anything interesting to say about them. They were really good and I really liked them. I have been writing and deleting and writing the same message all week: it feels really bad not to hear from you. Sometimes it says it feels really bad not to hear back from you. I guess that is all the writing I have room for this week. The books are more than capable of speaking for themselves.
Naamah by Sarah Blake
But then she is back on the boat eating stew, where she catches a grain of sand on her tooth. She hears it so loud in her bite that it seems for a moment like lightning strikes the boat, setting it on fire, as if it might kill them all and foil God's plan, but she keeps chewing, knowing she's being watched, and as the grain finds its way between her teeth again and again and the sound grows familiar, the feeling becomes smaller, more manageable, easy to tuck inside herself, the sound of a flaw, for her to enjoy alone, until she catches the grain in a spot where she can move it back and forth with her jaw, where she can determine its shape and crush it more precisely, into something that can't make a sound.
Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas
We walked on in almost complete silence. There were many things I wanted to tell him, but I didn't know how to start a conversation with this person walking by my side. It was as if between our arms stood an invisible wall and I had to climb over it to be able to talk to the other M. I was waiting for a sign from him, hoping he would continue one of our written conversations of the previous weeks. Anything that might consolidate the distance between the two M.'s. But M.—this one walking by my side—did not make any effort to overcome this wall. I wonder whether he felt a similar estrangement, or if he was simply observing my different states.
When I try to remember him, I sometimes have this same feeling of exhaustion, of someone behind a wall whose entirety is hidden from me, but appears in patches. It tires me to try to bring these patches together and after a while I release them from my mind's weakening grip and let them float back to their separate corners: the tall man, the writer, the hesitant hand appearing from the pocket, the wandering, distant stare.
August by Romina Paula, trans. Jennifer Croft
He said nothing in response to my reproach, what could he have said, he just let me cry, which was the best thing he could do, the only thing he could do. I keep crying, but now I can't believe this moment, I don't understand if I'm experiencing absolute fortune or absolute misfortune. I don't know. I want it not to end, for it to never end, for it to kill me but kill me suspended there, on him, get inside his wolf shirt, his ugly wolf T-shirt, and have them tear me apart, first tear my clothes off, so that I look sexier being dead, and then me, my flesh, with their teeth, the parts of my body. I want them to devour me, rip me to shreds, to devour me completely and then sleep afterwards, full under the moon, but I don't want any hunter ever to come and open up their stomachs and put stones inside them to replace my parts because I will already be rent into a thousand pieces, because in any case no one could put me back together.
How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas
Every birthday, I updated my will. I'd written the first draft at age eight, after finding out about the existence of wills in American movies. It seemed mandatory to have a will, in American movies. When someone died, a will was uncovered, and complications and tensions could arise from a nonupdated version. That's why I went back to mine at least once a year, to check its accuracy, and, if needed, make minor changes. If I broke something, though, I wouldn't wait until my birthday and would just take my will out of its binder and cross out the thing I'd broken without necessarily reassessing the whole document.
The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri
Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, "Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life." I thought I'd pass out—a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hands of Morvarid, my friend and nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother's fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm—life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn't do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit.
Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum
There had to be a code, a way to reveal the secret, the mystery behind these words, and although I was unable to grasp it, to know it, I never ceased to marvel at its otherworldliness, how the words were strung together to create nothing. Nothing. The creation of nothing is mind-bogglingly beautiful. Like how infinity is beautiful, and how stars have long before burned out by the time we see them, that when we see a star, there is, in fact, nothing. The poem belonged with those elements of the natural world like the speed of light and quarks and that there is so much shit packed into one nucleus, things I knew to be true, but still, I could not make them real. The poem was there, on paper, in my hands, but I could not grab hold of it any more than I could grab hold of the nothingness before the Big Bang.
I wonder when I will be able to move Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl from my bed to the bookshelves. Some books stay here with me for a long time.
Your friend,
Smalls
P.S. If you missed it—and I know many of you are here specifically because you didn't miss it—earlier this month I threw a lit match onto the remains of what used to be my professional life. You can read it here.